Category Archives: Hardware

I bought a new Toshiba Satellite L310 Notebook last week. It is my first laptop and I’m happy that I bought it with my own money (from my salary). Weeks before I took the Tosh, I had been looking for a good laptop which would be a nice pickup taking into account the price, configuration and style. I was planning to take a Dell Inspiron 14 or Dell Inspiron 15 before I had changed my mind to the HP Pavilion Series. But the HP Pavilion laptops I liked were not there in the retail shops and Amazon (Actually there was, but they wouldn’t ship to India). After some time surfing the web, my eyes stuck into a review of Asus EeePC at Register. It is a netbook (meant for common tasks such as browsing, e-mail etc.) with a mind-blowing battery backup of 9Hrs (but the absence of optical drive is a compromise). For the next few weeks there was not even a single other notebook in my mind. But when I reached home from Chennai, one of my cousin, who is working in a Computer Peripherals Marketing Company told me about the Tosh. He said that one is the best one they’re having now at their showroom. After explaining the configurations of the Tosh, I began to think that taking a netbook only is a waste and made up my mind to take a Tosh instead.

Next day I visited the retail shop and purchased a Toshiba Satellite L310-D4012 (I still donno why the model is not showing in the official Tosh website). Its not that bad in looks, infact I liked the lappie on first sight itself. The only think I didnt’t like about Tosh is that its colour is not black, its metallic silver. Here is my Tosh’s spec

Now you would be thinking about the price Huh? It might be 45K or 40K. But tell you the truth. I got this machine for just 33500/-, the best deal as they said and for sure it is.

Then the only problem infront of me was the Tosh’s Linux support. I installed the latest Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope to my new Tosh and I got really excited to see the Tosh working just fine under Linux. Here I will tell you about the hardwares I tested.

Note: Some of the ACPI functions are not working because of the Phoenix BIOS. I think a BIOS update will resolve the issue of not having an option to turn on the bluetooth in BIOS Settings. I searched the web for ACPI configuration, but even the omnibook modules didn’t work for me.

Some Tricks : If you feel you’re having low volume on Jaunty, try this. Add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1 model=3stack

After a restart, you’ll feel some changes. Also look here for resolving your sound problems.

Today I got a chance to put my hand on the beautiful HP Pavilion DV6000 Notebook which my uncle bought from Kuwait. It was pre-installed with Windows Vista :(, and he already complainted about Vista that it runs awesomely slow. It runs too slow eventhough it had a Dualcore processor and 2GB of RAM. Later I found that it contained dozens and dozens of unwanted softwares that runs on the startup. I removed them and now it runs Vista better.

Being a Free Software and GNU/Linux enthusiast and a promoter of GNU/Linux, I decided to try Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Live DVD on the Lappie. Alas !!!!, it gave me the GNOME desktop in a flash :). Sound worked perfectly and the sound quality was perfect as in Vista (Lappie have Altec Lansing Speakers). As it was having Nvidia Graphics the Compiz effects were not working with the Free Nvidia drivers (But the Binary packages from restricted drivers section enables it).

Next, I tried Knoppix 5.3.1 on it and being a lighning fast Live Distro it booted to the Desktop like the way it was booting from haddisk. All the hardwares worked like charm under Knoppix and I was really excited to see the new HP Pavilion DV6000 Notebook working smoothly under GNU/Linux.

For those who are planning to buy a laptop, this one is one of my recommendation :).

Ooops I forgot to check whether Wireless and Modem worked under Linux, I’ll check it and post it later.